Faster image processing on the Mac

[Andrew L. M. Shalit <alms>]

   Date: Tue, 08 Jan 91 10:37:12 PST
   From: philip@Pescadero.Stanford.EDU

   > Did you try to speed up the mac with software accelerators like e.g.
   > Radius SANE?
   Does MACL use SANE? This is a pretty slow way of doing floating point.
   You can lose up to 20x the performance of going directly to the FPU.

No, MACL does not use SANE.  It makes the FPU calls directly.  If
there is on FPU, we catch the processor error and redirect the call to
SANE.

MACL floating point is slow because of generic arithmetic dispatch,
and because we cons floats (which also requires boxing and unboxing)
and don't detect intermediate results.

   -andrew